How do new infrastructures for the movement of goods, people, and ideas get built, and how do they change? How do infrastructures function as instruments for new modes of political power and control? Can social actors mobilize to shape the direction of infrastructure change? These are the core questions that animate this excellent set of articles written by an emerging cohort of STS scholars with an interest in Indonesia Each of the articles presents a case study of a specific infrastructure project: Mohsin traces the history of a state-led project to build out the electrical grid in Bali during Indonesia's New Order; Padawangi examines the politics of a community-based proj. ect aimed at expanding piped water service to poor neighborhoods in Jakarta; Fatimah analyzes a university-based project to establish a new biofuel industry in Sumbawa; and Budiastuti describes the deployment of a new DNA tracking system for Indonesian timber exports. Taken together, these case studies contribute to an emerging picture of sociotechnical change in Indonesia that draws sharp contrasts between how infrastructures were built and organized during the New Order period (1966-98) and how they are coming to be built and organized now.
During the New Order, new infrastructures were built mainly by the state in a top-down fashion and aimed to modernize Indonesian society by incorporating Indonesins into the expanding global capitalist economy while retaining centralized state control. In more recent years, infrastructure innovation has been driven by private firms and nonstate actors and has focused much more on expanding the reach of capitalism by developing distributed forms of governance and control. In what follows, I describe the central features of the New Order pattern of infrastructure innovation and show some of the ways these features have become "unbundled" and are being refashioned for use in the post-New Order era. I then draw on the case studies to ask, how is the old politics of infrastructure being rearticulated, challenged, or subverted now that the state's role has been diminished?
